Sri Lankan Workshop: Coconut Rotis

To accompany the spicy, piquant tomato sambal and creamily delicious paripoo, we made some coconut rotis.

I'm not usually a fan of coconut meat (although I adore coconut milk and coconut based curries!) but these were really good - and complimented the two sauces very well.

The biggest challenge is trying not to eat them as they come out of the pan ;)

Coconut Rotis

225g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
180g freshly grated coconut (use a processor for this if you can - otherwise it'd be a lot of hard work!)
30g softened butter (optional)
2/3 green chilies - finely chopped (optional)
2 tbsp finely chopped onions
Coconut oil for frying

In a bowl, mix together the flour, coconut and salt, then add just enough water to form a dough. If you have any of coconut milk left you could use some of that here (either from the paripoo, or the real stuff from cracking the coconut open!). The tutor used some 'real' coconut milk, with some coconut milk from a tin, mixed in with a bit of water.

You want the mixture to be very soft, but not so sticky that it sticks to the work surface.

Work in the onions, butter, and chilies (if using). You may need to add a bit more flour now if the mixture is too wet.

Knead for 5 minutes, them leave to rest for about 20 minutes.

Divide the mixture into 10 balls.

Heat a heavy-based frying pan until very hot, and add some coconut oil. If you don't have any oil, then you could use ghee instead. As you do each ball, only add oil if required, you probably shouldn't need to for each one.

For each ball:

1. Roll out until about 5mm thick. The way we did this in class was to place a ball between two sheets of greaseproof paper, then used our fingers to spread it out.
2. Peel the roti from the paper and place in the centre of the pan.
3. Cook for 1 minute
4. Turn with the spatula and cook for a further minute on the other side.
   

Serve with a Sri Lankan curry (or curries!) of your choice!

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